I ought to say some things about json-ld, because I think a lot of people aren't familiar with the details of it.

- You can play with json-ld live here: https://json-ld.org/playground/- JSON-LD lets you have extensions but map them to local "compacted" shorthands, while still allowing to expand out into unambiguous form.- JSON-LD does allow converting to a RDF graph, but it's not required. (It is interesting, though.)

- Unlike most specs, JSON-LD has a complete implementation guide https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld-api/ Some people have been complaining on here that it's non-normative, but of course it's not normative. For example, the algorithms here are imperative, and it's legal to rewrite to a functional style without breaking the spec.- The JSON-LD test suite is *fantastic* and if you do an implementation, will really catch a lot of things

- One of the suggestions in the "litepub" subset of activitypub being proposed (I think it's fine to explore a subset) is that core AS2 terms can be compacted while extensions should be their full URI. That's fine, and is compatible, but- If you have a json-ld library handy, one thing you can do is just compact incoming data to the context *you* use. It'll do exactly the same thing with terms you don't know but will let you use shorthands for those you do.

- One complaint about json-ld is that it doesn't work nicely with statically compiled languages or ones with fixed records. That's because it's an open world system. But here's news: *any system* that has extensions (including litepub's proposed solution) will have this problem. Litepub won't get rid of this challenge (because records will still be fixed and won't know how to handle extensions). It would mean you wouldn't have to use a json-ld library, but those are two different things

- JSON-LD didn't come from the semantic web world, it even started as a reaction against it in some ways. Here's history from one of the JSON-LD founders, Manu Sporny: "JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web" http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/- JSON-LD's inclusion in ActivityPub had nothing to do with pressure from W3C staff. Most W3C staff barely paid attention to ActivityPub or the SocialWG compared to most other working groups before it took off thanks to Mastodon's adoption

@alcinnz The lack of management and corporate interest in AP while it was being standardized was a blessing and a curse. Early on Tim Berners-Lee was interested, but lost interest when we weren't quite as devoted to RDF as he'd like in some ways (or maybe he was just busy). But we never got corporate interest, which actually threatened our ability to get specs to Recommendation status.

@alcinnzOTOH it also stopped Google & Facebook for stepping in and bulldozing it as "their standard" and ignoring the community, or alternately perceiving us as serious enough of a threat to try to shut us down. My experience in standards says that sadly that happens *a lot* in the W3C and even most standards groups, sadly. So maybe in that sense it's a good thing that the big players barely paid us any mind.